Beginning June 1, 2011, all Westchester County residents, businesses, and schools will be required to recycle not only 1 and 2 numbered plastics, but plastics 3 through 7 as well. 

According to the Westchester County Source Separation Law, items acceptable for recycling include food, beverage, detergent, and shampoo containers and caps, all of which should be rinsed clean before being put out for recycling. For further information on curbside recycling, please check out the county's guide here. 

Equally important to keep in mind are the items deemed not suitable for recycling.  They include the following:

• Any plastic bags including dry cleaning and grocery store bags.
• Packaging materials and vinyl.
• Unmarked plastics such as toys or clothing hangers.
• Plastic foam.
• Containers holding hazardous materials.
• Building materials like kitchen fixtures and PVC piping.

So, what are you supposed to do with those flimsy plastic grocery bags and yards of dry cleaning plastic? Whatever you do, don’t use the bags to toss out your other recyclables without dumping them out first.

As Sarah Garvan, staff assistant in Solid Waste at the Westchester Department of Environmental Facilities (DEF) explains, “There is no mechanism to get recyclables out of bags—unfortunately, these recyclables become unusable.”

The facility receives many items in plastic bags—particularly from multi-residences in urban areas—which are used to protect items that previously held food from the ravages of pests, said Garvan.  Although, sometimes sorters are able to cut open plastic bags and salvage recyclables, other times the items are rejected and treated as garbage.

Those items designated as garbage when they arrive at the recycling facility—nonrecyclables and oversized items—are then sent to a waste-to-energy facility in Peekskill where they are incinerated to make clean renewable energy, says Garvan. This garbage helps to power a total of 88,000 houses in Westchester. 

Americans use approximately 1 billion plastic bags per year which accounted for 300,000 tons of landfill waste, according to a Clean Air Council report from 2009 entitled “Why Plastic Bag Fees Work.”

To prevent this from happening, you can take your bags to larger grocery and retail stores—typically those over 10,000 square feet—where bins are set up near the front entrance for plastic bag return, according to the Westchester Department of Environmental Facilities (DEF) Web site.  Keep in mind you can also recycle the bags that held your bread, cereal, frozen food, and produce in those same bins, however, remember to remove food residue before dropping them in bins. A list of some participating retailers can be viewed on the right hand side of this article, as a PDF file, or you can call your local store to see if they provide recycling bins. 

Recycling efforts appear to be paying off. Recent statistics from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Web site indicate that over a 29-year span—from 1980 to 2009—67 additional tons of garbage (from 15 million to 82 million) bypassed the landfill and, instead, were recycled or composted. 

Although the previous statistic cited is encouraging, as a whole, the EPA also reports that the U.S. is only recycling or composting 34 percent of waste, with 12 percent being burned at combustion facilities, and the remaining 54 percent disposed of in landfills. As of 2006, only 1,754 Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) landfills remained, down from 8,000 in 1988.

Editors Note: A previous version of this article misspelled the name of Sarah Garvan, staff assistant at the Westchester DEF.  Also, when the garbage is sent to the waste-to-energy site in Peekskill, it is incinerated to make clean renewable energy, not non-renewable energy.